To acquire the properties of ear characters in maize automatically, a panorama of the maize ear was captured by using a line scan camera. Then the data was extracted through image processing methods. A part of the original line scan image was selected as a template. The ear image with exactly 360° views was cropped according to the normalized cross correlation of the template with the original image. Otsu method was used to segment the maize kernels, but the kernels on the image borders were split into two parts. The connectivity of those two parts of one kernel on both borders was taken as a clue to merge them into ones. This process improved the counting accuracy of kernel numbers. The row number of the kernel was obtained from the image projection method. The profile of projection was smoothed to solve the extreme points as the row number. Experiment results showed the counting accuracy of kernels numbers and kernel rows numbers were 94.6% and 99.1%, respectively.